Debian Weekly News - October 8th, 2002

Welcome to this year's 39th issue of DWN, the weekly newsletter for the
Debian community. This week we are pleased to include two items by both Matt Black
and Richard Wale. Now that the Free Standards Group has released
specification of Linux Standard Base 1.2 (LSB), it is seeking items missing from it,
which probably also affects Debian.

OpenSSL with CPU Optimisation. Christoph Martin announced
that he has uploaded new packages for the OpenSSL library. The new version exploits
the ability of the shared library loader to include special directories
depending on the CPU architecture. Optimisation is currently available
for i486, i586, i686, sparc-v8, sparc-v9, alpha-ev4 and alpha-ev5. For details see the file
README.optimizations in /usr/share/doc/openssl/.

Problematic BitKeeper License. Branden Robinson pointed out that some of us may be exposed to tort claims from BitMover,
Inc., the company that produces BitKeeper, the software that is the primary
source management tool for the Linux kernel. Your license to use BitKeeper
free of charge is revoked if you or your employer develop, produce, sell, or
resell a source management tool. Debian distributes
rcs, cvs, subversion and
arch at least and this seems to be a different case. Ben Collins however, who works on both the Linux kernel and
the subversion project, got his license to use BitKeeper free of charge revoked. Ulrich Drepper experienced similar problems. This has also been brought up on Slashdot and
discussed on debian-devel.

LWN subscription for the Debian Project? A while ago Linux Weekly News (LWN) experienced financial
trouble and identified it by starting a subscription service that has to be paid for. Branden Robinson
asked
LWN whether they would be interested in donating an LWN subscription to the
Debian Project, since Debian generates a fair share of news for LWN to
cover. Henrique de Moraes Holschuh however, asked to
acquire such a license, instead, to support LWN.

KDE 3 heats up. This week the KDE Project released KDE 3.1
beta2. The goal of the release is to provide new features as well as to
solve several known problems. Packages for woody are available
for Debian users who don't want to wait for official Debian packages. David
Pastern gave advice on
installing KDE3 as well.

Cryptography in South Africa. Lukas Geyer brought up
efforts by the South African government to regulate the distribution of
"cryptography products". The law
will require providers of "cryptography products" to register their details
with, and pay a fee to, the government. This will at least cause a problem
with Debian mirrors in South Africa.

XFree86 4.2.1 in unstable. After a lot of testing and
preparation, Branden and his
colleagues from the X Strike Force (XSF) have finally unleashed XFree86 4.2.1
to the incoming directory. Many thanks to Branden and the XSF for all their hard work
in making this a reality.

GNOME 2 Transition. Colin Walters announced
to the debian-gtk-gnome list that he had started to maintain a web page about using
GNOME 2 for woody, sarge and sid during the transition progresses.
This page lists the available scenarios and known issues.

Incompatible new Bogofilter Package. Clint Adams sent a warning to
users of bogofilter. The package uses a new database format and doesn't
convert files automatically. His mail contains upgrade instructions for
users who would like to keep their spam databases with the new version.
Alternatively, you could just wipe out the old files and start building them
again with the new version.

Debian "removed" archive? Drew Scott Daniels tried to setup an
archive of removed Debian packages at SourceForge. This issue has been discussed several times, since orphaned
packages that nobody would like to maintain are likely to be silently removed.
However, Sourceforge explained that their mission is the development of Open
Source Applications and not hosting a pure content repository.

Debian Mini-Conf at LCA2003. Jonathan Oxer sent in a reminder
for the Debian Mini-Conference which is
to be hosted at the upcoming Linux Conference
Australia. Jonathan still needs more people willing to do presentations.
He has so far already received 39 registrations for the Mini-conference.

Perl Transition not Migrating. Some people may have
already noticed that the new Perl 5.8 does not migrate into testing. This is
due to several packages still depending on the older version of Perl, as Joey
Hess pointed
out. Funnily, the Python transition contributes to this problem since
PostgreSQL is out of date on most architectures due to a Python error.

Debian FreeBSD Update. Nathan Hawkins sent in an updated
status
report for the Debian port to FreeBSD. Basically, he has been busy working
on glibc and has been contributing patches to the package. He also has some
of the essential BSD utilities building under glibc and will continue to work
on the rest. Mostly this involves working on the system headers that glibc
didn't include. Later he reported that
glibc is working well except for DNS resolution. Also X is building nearly
everything except the server, which helps a lot already.

BTS supports MIME. Colin Watson announced that a new version of the mail bot for the Debian Bug Tracking
System (BTS) has been installed. This version adds MIME support for initial
incoming bug reports. This means that you can now safely submit bug reports
with attachments without having to wait for the bug number to come back,
GPG-sign bug submissions and control messages, and so on.

Debian Project at UK Linux Expo. There will be a Debian
booth at the upcoming UK Linux
Expo in London this Wednesday and Thursday (9th and 10th of October).
Registration is required, but there are no entrance fees. People from Debian
will sell woody CDs at the exhibition and Debian will be demonstrated running
on various architectures (maybe even including NetBSD).

Security Updates. You know the drill. Please make sure
that you update your systems if you have any of these packages installed.

Want to continue reading DWN? Please help us create this
newsletter. Currently, it's mostly a one-man show, which is anticipated to
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Please see the contributing
page to find out how to help. We're looking forward to receiving your
mail at dwn@debian.org.